It Stings So Sweet (5 page)

CHAPTER

Five

At my dressing table the next morning, I use my gilded
brush to tame the waves of my hair into a bob. My face is pale in the mirror, a
bluish tint of exhaustion
below my eyes. A warm bath in the claw-foot tub soothed the soreness in my muscles, but my
head still pounds with crushing insistence. Perhaps it would have been better if I
had
been sick
the night before. If I’d heaved up everything inside me instead of letting it fester.

The house
is quiet but for the periodic ring of the telephone from downstairs. I’ve ignored it for hours,
caught in a cloud of depression. My girl, Dolly, raps at the door. She has a pot of tea and she pours
some for me, stopping to arrange the vase of bluebells and violets. “Your father intends to call
upon you this afternoon, ma’am.”

There’s an edge in her voice and I don’t have to guess why.
My father will have heard about last night. He’ll be smug, insufferable, perhaps he’ll demand that
Jonathan stay married to me. My father is always one to bluster and issue threats. But he can’t subject
Jonathan to financial ruin—at least not anymore. This time, there is nothing either of us can do
to make Jonathan stay.

“Breakfast is almost ready downstairs,” Dolly chirps, as if to rouse
my spirits. “Fresh butter, cream, and eggs from the Saturday market.”

I’m about to say that
I’m not hungry, when I realize that I’m famished. Some ravenous creature inside me has been awakened,
and I need to eat. Downstairs at the table, I take my place at the far end, reaching for a pear from
the fruit-bowl centerpiece. Then I stare at Jonathan’s empty seat. This is how it will be from now
on, but I can’t think of that at the moment.

“Should we wait for Mr. Richardson?” Dolly asks,
hovering with a basket of biscuits.

“He’s gone,” I make myself say, biting into the pear, which
tastes like ash. “And he’s not coming back.”

Dolly tilts her head in confusion. “He’s upstairs,
ma’am.”

The bite of pear catches in my throat. I swallow with difficulty. “He’s here? Here,
in the house still?”

“Yes, ma’am. In his bedroom.”

Launching up from my chair, I rush
to the stairway, nearly catching my heel in the expensive imported rug. I have to check myself. He’s
here
. Jonathan is still here. At least for a little longer. My hand turns on the smooth wooden banister
and I hurry up the stairs, an effort that has me breathless by the time I reach my husband’s
door.

He’s stripped to the waist, stooping over the suitcase on his bed. Another one is open
on the chair. Just looking at him, and the preposterous good looks with which he’s been blessed, the
pain shoots through me and I have to steady myself on the door frame. Jonathan glances up. “What’s
wrong?”

“I can’t seem to catch my breath,” I say, because it’s so obviously true. “And my head
aches terribly.”

“I’m sorry,” Jonathan says, with a rueful sigh. “I shouldn’t have made you
drink all that.”

“I’m sorry that I let Robert Aster kiss me, but that’s not going to keep you
from leaving, is it?”

“I’m not leaving,” he says without looking at me.

My mouth falls
open. “Then what are you doing?”

He holds up the folded shirt in his hands. “Unpacking. After
last night’s misconduct, it doesn’t seem right to let you face the music by yourself.”

So he
is the agreeable gentleman again. The bloodless man who has lived in this room, apart from me, for
the past year. “You’re not leaving,” I say, to be certain I have it right.

“I’m not leaving.
Not now.” Again, he averts his eyes so that I can’t read anything in that striking blue gaze. “Not
unless . . . not unless you want me to.”

I surprise myself by saying, “That depends.”

He takes some sock garters from his bag, folding them precisely. “If it’s the money you’re worried about,
you can have it all. I won’t leave the marriage with anything but what I brought to it.”

“You
bought this house, Jonathan. With money that you earned.”

“Working for your father,” he says,
flatly. “It’s been very profitable for me.”

“You could work for someone else. Or for yourself.”

He turns away to open a bureau drawer. “I’m sure I could.”

I’m captivated by the beauty
of his lean shoulders and the youthful arch of his spine. That I feel as if I can’t reach out and touch
him, that I can’t press my lips to the back of his neck and draw him into a kiss . . . that even
though I am his wife, I don’t feel free to do any of these things, not even after last night, decides
it for me. “Jonathan, I don’t want you to stay if nothing is going to change.”

He stiffens,
hands gripping the edge of the bureau. “I can’t give you what you need, Nora.”

“I know I behaved
like a spoiled brat. I let another man put his hands on me to get your attention. I acted like
a daddy’s girl who has never had to go without anything she ever wanted in her whole life—”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did. When I couldn’t have your attention, I let Robert Aster give
me his. It was foolish.
I
was foolish. I was selfish. And you have every right to be furious—”

“Stop it,” Jonathan says.

“Why won’t you let me tell you how sorry I am?”

“Because
all of this is my fault, not yours. And even if it weren’t, I’ve already forgiven you.”

A gasp
sputters from my throat. “What?”

“You were drunk and you kissed another man. It’s not the crime
of the century. I forgive you. It’s done, Nora. It’s over. We never have to speak of it again.”

“Given the scene at last night’s party, I doubt that very much.”

“That won’t happen again.”

“Maybe it should.”

He turns to face me and bellows, “Goddamn it, Nora! I don’t know what
you want from me.”

“I want you to
want
me,” I cry, though it is only the smallest part of what
I want from him.

“For the love of God, woman, I can’t
stop
wanting you. That’s the whole problem.”

If this is a problem, it is one that has never occurred to me. “Then why have we been sleeping
apart for the last year?”

Pure agony swims in his eyes. “I’m trying to protect you from the
monster that lives inside me.”

“You’re no monster,” I say, coming to him to give comfort.

He shrugs away. “I am. You know I am. You saw only a glimpse of that monster last night—”

“I provoked you, Jonathan.”

“And some part of me was grateful that you did. You gave me
just the excuse I needed to let my worst instincts run riot. Watching those men touch you, watching
you dance with them, it made me need to possess you. To show them all—and you—that you’re mine.”

“I
am
yours,” I whisper, unspeakably aroused by the way he says the word
mine
.

“You gave
me an excuse to punish you, Nora. And I liked it. I
loved
it.”

Am I supposed to condemn him
for this? I’d be a sorry hypocrite if I did. His words only make me want to do it all again—push him
to the edge of fury. The only thing that stops me is the fear of pushing him too far. “So . . . maybe
 . . .” My head feels as if it’s filled with cotton and I have difficulty forming thoughts. Trying
to capture everything I’m thinking, everything I’m feeling, I say, “I’m your
wife
, Jonathan. Maybe
you don’t need an excuse.”

“Wife or not, I have no right to treat you that way. You stand here
telling me that you’re sorry, asking for my forgiveness, when I’m the one who should be on bended
knee, begging for yours.”

“For what? I don’t know how many ways I can say it, Jonathan. You
didn’t do anything to me that I didn’t want you to do.”

He looks me directly in the eye. “I
killed our child, Nora, and you know it.”

This stops me. Startles me into utter silence. My
limbs go rigid. I am a statue of horror. “
What
?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking
about. I can’t stand it.”

But I don’t know what he’s talking about. I haven’t the faintest
idea. I only know that the reminder of the baby I lost still hits me so hard that I need to sit down.
I find a chair, a stool, I don’t know what. I just flounder for it, and sink down. “What did you do,
Jonathan?” I ask, in morbid fascination.

That he didn’t want the baby, that it had trapped
him into marriage, was obvious from the start. But I could imagine no scenario in which he might have
taken action against me or my unborn child. I’d been wretchedly sick, that much is true, but he can’t
have had any control over that. What is he suggesting? Poison in my tea?

Jonathan slams the
door, as if that would prevent the servants from hearing our argument. Then he turns on me like a madman.
“Are you going to tell me you don’t remember the last time we had sex?”

“Given the state of
my ruined dress, I’m not likely to forget it.”

“Not last night. Before. The
last
time.”

I shake my head. I remember the night of the wedding on a bed piled high with cushions. The time in
front of the fireplace, on the chaise lounge. The afternoon when we stole away from a garden party
and found a place against a tree in the hedge. But all of that was before the miscarriage . . . I don’t
remember which time was the last time.

He crosses the room in three angry strides and grasps
me by the back of the neck. “Stand up.” Slow to move, I’m propelled by his strong arms into a standing
position. Moments later, I find myself down, face-first, on the mattress. “Does this refresh your
memory?”

It does, actually, and all of my insides turn to liquid heat.

“I took you from
behind,” Jonathan says, shaking me like a rag doll on the bedspread. “Like an animal. I held you down
against the mattress. I struck you. With my belt.”

The memory forces me to moan. It had taken
two, maybe three cracks of his belt on the backs of my thighs before I begged him to put himself
inside me. He’d shoved inside me, slammed his hips against me, and kept me pinned to the bed. And when
I fought to push back, to take him deeper, he’d caught the nape of my neck in his teeth. I’d yelped
with an orgasm that left me exhausted and deeply satisfied.

The thought that he might do the
same to me now makes me weak with desire, but he’s trying to make a point. “Do you remember, Nora?”

“Yes,” I say, stretching my hands to push the half-packed suitcase off the bed. It falls to
the floor, spilling its contents everywhere, and I twist in his arms. He has me in his grips, but I
have him in mine. “I remember.”

His expression collapses, lower lip trembling. “Two days later,
the baby was gone.”

He’s tangled with me upon the bed now and I make him look at me. “That
wasn’t your fault, Jonathan! God, how can you even think it?”

His voice is barely a whisper.
“I beat that child right out of you.”

Some dark part of me nearly seizes onto this explanation.
Finally, an answer to all my questions. All my late-night tearful pleas, in which I begged God
to show me what I’d done wrong. In which I’d been certain that losing my child had been a punishment
for all my wickedness. It took so long for me to accept that there was nothing we could, or should,
have done differently. But somehow, looking at the anguish on Jonathan’s face, it takes only seconds
for me to accept it again now. “Women miscarry, Jonathan. It just happens.”

“It doesn’t
just
happen
,” he says.

“Yes, it does. My mother lost four pregnancies before she had me. My sister
lost her first as well.”

This seems to shock him. “I didn’t know . . .”

“I never wanted
to tell you. I didn’t want you to worry that . . . that you’d married a woman who . . . who couldn’t
bear you children.” It’s horrifically difficult to admit this to him. Still, his body is knotted
in wordless pain that I’m desperate to soothe. “A few little slaps with a belt in love play did not
cause a miscarriage, Jonathan. You didn’t beat the child out of me!”

His features twist with
grief, eyes bloodshot. “Then why did you tell your father that I did?”

I begin to wonder if
Jonathan is still drunk—or perhaps I am. “My father? What are you talking about?”

“I can’t
blame you for running to him. He told me what you said, Nora.”

By god, what had I said? Consumed
with grief I had gone to my father’s house after the miscarriage. But only for a few days. I’d
just wanted to sit in my old room. I’d wanted familiar things around me. I can scarcely now recall,
in my haze of mourning, what I’d said or done. “Jonathan, I didn’t blame you for what happened, even
then.”

“You told your father that I put rough hands on you,” he says.

“I did not!” I exclaim,
hurtling up to a sitting position.

“You told him that I was too rough with you. That I hurt
you. That I hurt the baby—”

“I said no such thing,” I insist, and this time, there are no doubts.
No madness of grief would ever make those words pass my lips. Not to my father or anyone else.
“It isn’t true. It just isn’t true.”

My husband has been carrying this for a year now and I
see how reluctant he is to put it down. “Nora, you don’t have to protect me. I’m a man. It’s my job
to protect you.”

“You didn’t hurt me or our baby and I never told anyone that you did. I didn’t
go running off to my father, or to Robert Aster, to get away from you. You’re my
husband
, Jonathan.”

He searches my eyes, as if he wants to believe me. “Am I truly? Because I know that you were
trapped into this marriage when you got pregnant. And if I were any kind of honorable man, I’d have
let you go before now.”

The breath goes out of me. “You think that
you
trapped
me
into this
marriage? That’s what you think?”

“I remember how scared you were the day you told me that
you were pregnant. But I was thrilled, Nora. I was barely making a wage. I didn’t know how I was going
to support a wife and child. But none of that mattered to me because your being pregnant meant that
I had you. I
had
you and no one could take you away from me. I had something that would’ve otherwise
never been in my reach.”